The Best New Horror 2 Read Online Free Page B

girl’s two-piece swimsuit. Then he folded the paper back up and stuck it in the book where he kept it. He didn’t think the diagram was going to do him any good where he was going.
    “All right—let’s get this show on the road.” His uncle Tommy leaned out of the driver’s-side window and slapped the door’smetal. They always went down there in Tommy’s car because it was the biggest, an old Dodge that wallowed like a boat even on the straightways. The other guys chipped in for the gas. “Come on—let’s move on out.” Tommy’s big yellow grin was even looser; he’d already gotten into the six-pack stowed down on the floor.
    For a moment, he thought they’d all forgotten about taking him along. There were already five guys in the car when it’d pulled up in front of the house, and his father would make the sixth. He stood on the porch, feeling a secret hope work at the knot in his gut.
    “Aw, man—what the hell were you guys thinking of?” The voice of one of the guys in the car floated out, across the warm evening air. It was Bud, the one who worked at the cinder block factory. “There’s no way you can stick seven of us in here, and then drive all the way down there.”
    The guy next to Bud, in the middle of the backseat, laughed. “Well, hell—maybe you can just sit on my lap, then.”
    “Yeah, well, you can just sit on this.” Bud gave him the finger, then drained the last from a can of beer and dropped it onto the curb. Bud pushed the door open and got out. “You guys just have a fine old time without me. I got some other shit to take care of.”
    Tommy’s grin grew wider. “Ol’ Bud’s feeling his age. Since that little sweetheart last time fucked up his back for him.”
    “Your ass.”
    From the porch, he watched Bud walking away, the blue glow of the streetlights making the cinder block dust on Bud’s workshirt go all silver. He couldn’t tell if Bud had been really mad—maybe about him coming along and taking up space in the car—or if it was just part of the joke. A lot of the time he couldn’t tell whether his father and his buddies were joking or not.
    “Come on—” His father had already gotten in the car, up front, elbow hanging over the sill of the door. “What’re you waiting for?”
    He slid in the back. The seat had dust from Bud’s shirt on it, higher up than his own shoulders. “Here we go,” said his father, as his head rocked back into the cinder block dust. The guy next to him, his father’s buddy, peeled a beer off a six-pack and handed it to him. He held it without opening it, letting the cold seep into his hands as the streets pivoted around and swung behind the car, until they were past the last streetlight and onto the straight road heading for the southern hills.
    All the way down there, they talked about baseball. Or football, shouting over the radio station that Tommy had turned up loud. He didn’t listen to them, but leaned his shoulder against the door, gulping breath out of the wind, his face stung red. For a long while he thought there was something running alongside the car, a dog or something,but faster than a dog could run, because his uncle Tommy had the car easily wound up to over seventy. The dog, or whatever it was, loped in the shadows at the side of the road, a big grin like Tommy’s across its muzzle, its bright spark eyes looking right at him. But when another car came along, going the other way, the headlights making a quick scoop over the road, the dog wasn’t there. Just the rocks and brush zooming by, falling back into the dark behind them. He pushed his face farther out into the wind, eyes squinted, the roar swallowing up the voices inside the car. The dog’s yellow eyes danced like coins out there, keeping alongside and smiling at him.
    “All
right
—we have uh-
rived
.” His uncle Tommy beat an empty beer can against the curve of the steering wheel, then pitched it outside.
    He looked up ahead, craning his neck to see